October 7, 1893: The Debut of Mr. Dooley

Mr. Dooley, as he appeared in 1900

October 7, 1893: Finley Peter Dunne of the Chicago Evening Post introduces the character of Mr. Dooley, to replace a regular character of his whose real-life counterpart had objected to the characterization as a heavily-accented Irish immigrant.

Martin J. Dooley was the proprietor of a saloon on Archer Avenue, in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, which would later became known as the home of the Daley political family and the Chicago White Sox' Comiskey Park. Dooley had come to America from County Roscommon during the Great Famine of the late 1840s, which swelled the ranks of the Irish in many countries, including America.

The timing of the debut was good: The calendar year of 1893 gave Dunne a lot of material, due to the depression that started that year, and the World's Columbian Exposition, a world's fair that had put Chicago on display to the world. In the next year, the 2nd and last year of the Exposition, came the Pullman Strike and its nasty resolution. Dunne had Dooley comment on these events, and he became a local phenomenon.

In 1898, Dunne moved his job and his character to the Chicago Journal, and the Spanish-American War gave him lots of new material. In 1901, on a question of whether the Constitution of the United States was in force in the lands America won in that war, Dunne had Dooley say his most famous line: "The Supreme Court follows the election returns."

Finley Peter Dunne

By that point, Theodore Roosevelt had become President, and invited Dunne to the White House, but this didn't stop Dunne from having some published fun at TR's expense. And that didn't stop TR from inviting him back.

A collection of Dunne's work, Observations of Mr. Dooley, appeared in 1902. It included this quote: "Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward." Eventually, it got shortened in the public mind to, "The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable."

The column stopped in 1915, as Dunne could find no humor in the increasing horrors of World War I. With his finances having suffered, Dunne brought Mr. Dooley back from 1922 to 1926. Dunne died in 1936, at age 68.

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October 7, 1893 was a Saturday. Baseball's regular season had ended, with the Boston Beaneaters, forerunners of the Braves, winning their 3rd straight National League Pennant. But there were college football games played on this day. Among them:

* Army beat Lafayette, 36-0 on The Plain in West Point, New York.

* Harvard beat Amherst, 32-0 at Jarvis Field in Boston.

* Yale beat the Crescent Athletic Club, 16-0 at Eastern Park in Brooklyn, then the home of the team that would be renamed the Dodgers.

* And the University of Michigan beat the Detroit Athletic Club, 6-0 at Regent's Field in Ann Arbor, Michigan.